CBA General Conference - 2004
NEWS AND SPEECHES
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From Privatisation back to Public Service : Keynote Speech to the CBA General Conference by Ian Fraser
The idea of going backwards to the future is something many of us find challenging. That’s no doubt why we decided at TVNZ to label our once-a-year, heavy duty management/board strategy meeting a Strategic Advance rather than a Strategic Retreat. What’s in a name? Not much, perhaps. But there’s a world of meaning in a little word like “back”.
So I’ve wanted a more palatable headline for what I’m here to talk about today. I thought I might borrow the title of Quentin Crisp’s second volume of autobiography and call my speech: How To Become a Virgin. Typically, of course, virginity is a “oncer”. Once it’s gone, it’s gone and never must return. Put “become” and “virgin” together and you have something more than a paradox.
It’s interesting that so many people describe the journey TVNZ is now embarked on as a “going back”. I must say I don’t see it that way at all. The journey that TVNZ is on, navigating by our new-ish Charter, is not a journey forward into the past. I have the feeling that the more nostalgic of our critics would be best pleased if we were simply to set ourselves to recreate the TV schedule from 1970. That was a time when watching the test pattern represented a nice night in. Coronation Street was in black and white – where many people still feel it belongs. New Zealand’s only licensed restaurant closed at 9. The country was full of strong and silent types, who had much to be silent about.
Most importantly, broadcasting’s place in those days was pre-eminent and unchallenged. These days the balance of power in the relationship between broadcasters and viewers has shifted markedly. We live in an age of viewer sovereignty. Our account of TVNZ’s task as a public broadcaster can’t, therefore, be based on the notion that we have a licence to bore and viewers have a duty to pay attention. Viewers have choices.
When we were delivered our Charter, almost a year ago, a chorus of dissenters, many of them in low places, attacked TVNZ’s new mission as something constructed to meet the needs of the ballet brigade and a pointy-headed elite – moral philosophers in tights. It was, we were assured, a recipe for the delivery of “worthy but dull”. This assault is rooted in the conviction that only the blunt commercial model can show itself to be both popular and responsive, as measured by the ratings, and commercially viable in pure market terms. Apart from anything else, this view is historically illiterate. It assumes that New Zealanders have become so inured to the commercial model that it is now seen as the only option.
The claim was also made, and it has been repeated many times since, that the Charter would be a licence for political interference. It would be not just an expression of this Government’s cultural project but would be skewed, by virtue of the fact that the Government owns TVNZ, towards the delivery of the Government’s political agenda.
In the age of Lord Hutton, this is not a charge to be lightly dismissed. The tension between politicians and journalists has been much debated and is easy enough to understand. The two estates have different, frequently conflicting tasks and roles. (And, of course, politicians tend to have a rather partial sense of the uses of television. I’m sure Noel Coward was speaking for politicians the world over when he said: “Television is not for looking at. It’s for being on.”) As a matter of fact, the TVNZ Charter charges us to “strive always to set and maintain the highest standards of programme quality and editorial integrity” and, later, it states explicitly that “TVNZ will provide independent, comprehensive, impartial and in-depth coverage and analysis of news and current affairs”. So, the founding document of the new TVNZ wears on its heart the absolute priority of editorial independence and impartiality.
Outside the Charter, but within TVNZ’s statute, there is also a clear direction to governments. “Nothing in this Act, it states, authorises any shareholding minister to give a direction to TVNZ in respect of a particular programme or programmes or a particular allegation or a particular complaint or in respect of the gathering or presentation of news or the preparation or presentation of current affairs programmes.” So, the TVNZ Act, the Charter and TVNZ’s own internal editorial protocols all explicitly prohibit political interference.
The freedom of the public broadcaster from political interference in editorial content has been hard won over many years in New Zealand and through very many public controversies. As a journalist and political interviewer, I was involved in a good number of them. If public broadcasting is the creature of government, it cannot properly discharge its responsibility to democracy.
We are talking here, of course, about liberty rather than licence. That means having in place proper processes to ensure accuracy, fairness, impartiality and so on – from the point at which the content is generated right through to the appropriate assessment of content after it has been broadcast. Those processes should not be so unreasonably restrictive that they prevent proper investigation or constrain the broadcaster from undertaking the vital exercise of interrogating power and holding it to account.
With regard to the BBC and Lord Hutton’s report, it’s clear to me that the BBC’s editorial protocols and processes are different from TVNZ’s in important respects. I don’t know whether or not they are adequate. What I would say is that while Andrew Gilligan’s story was not accurate in all respects, the BBC was right to broadcast it and right to stand by their journalist for as long as they did. As a journalist I’d be proud to have had Greg Dyke as my ultimate boss. I think it’s a disaster that he has had to go and so far as I’m concerned he has left the field with honour.
The usual bromide in cases of this sort is to suggest that “lessons have been learned”. No doubt they have. I hope that in learning them, the BBC does not resile one inch from its tradition of probing, fair and often discomforting journalism. On Lord Hutton’s approach overall, since my time today is limited, let’s just bestow the awful charity of our silence.
Returning to my backyard. While I have said that TVNZ will not be going forward mesmerised by the view in the rear vision mirror, I want to gaze into it for a moment or two and tell you what I see, as a basis for understanding what motivated our Government to change the model.
In 1988 TVNZ became a State Owned Enterprise. From that moment, public broadcaster considerations were placed a distant second to TVNZ’s over-riding commercial purpose. The primary point of the exercise – a large station on the track to privatisation -- was commercial. TVNZ would operate as a successful business and it would return a dividend to the Government. We became adept at delivering on the commercial remit. We had to be, for reasons which reach back beyond the State Owned Enterprise Act. I remember vividly what happened after Sir Robert Muldoon became Prime Minister in 1975 and resolutely refused to raise the licence fee – principally as a way of punishing the public broadcaster for expressing independent or dissenting views. So the state-owned television channels had to rely more and more on commercial revenue. We got better and better at giving advertisers what they wanted. But we weren’t nearly as good at satisfying the needs of viewers. On the couches of the nation the hungry sheep looked up and were not fed. And the wretches took to bleating about it more and more noisily.
Through all this, TVNZ maintained a stellar performance in the ratings. Any broadcaster that can boast, as we do, that during prime time on any night of the week, more than 70% of all the people watching television will be tuned to TVOne or TV2 is doing well, at least on one account of its task.
We now have a dual remit: deliver the Charter while maintaining our commercial performance. So, TVNZ must continue to report a strong ratings performance. Ratings are the currency our advertisers trade in and their contribution to our funding base, in the last financial year, amounted to more than $300 million. Furthermore, ratings are one test of our relevance to the New Zealand audience. But only one test. As TVNZ negotiates its way towards more recognisably public service broadcaster terrain, we will need to acknowledge that ratings are, at best, a very partial account of how fully we are satisfying viewers. A couple of years ago, the Chairman of the ABC said that “ratings provide a familiar and convenient measuring stick but they are not the best measure of excellence or usefulness. They can be part of the vocabulary in the continual assessment of our work but never the final sentence. And all they can ever tell you is what happened yesterday, not tomorrow, about the programme that has worked, not the one that is still to be imagined.” Steering largely or solely by the ratings was clearly not going to meet the needs of the growing body of New Zealanders who’ve been taking every opportunity to tell us they want better television. The Charter was born out of a determination that it was time TVNZ got the message.
What the Charter provides for is a form of public television where the satisfaction of the individual viewer is the primary objective and where cultural objectives are as highly prized as commercial ones.
This has to be at the heart of why the New Zealand government would continue to own TVNZ. If the purpose of TVNZ were simply commercial, why wouldn’t you let the private sector take it over. If the only measure, or the principal measure of shareholder value is the size of the dividend cheque the broadcaster generates, better and probably more effective to sell it. Before the Charter the task was to maximise profits and send as much of them as we could to Treasury. The new order is about something different.
However, we remain obliged to strike a balance with the market place. As a commercial broadcaster, we remain subject to market disciplines. We are mandated to give effect to the Charter while (in the words of the TVNZ Act) maintaining our commercial performance. So we’re not going commercial free. We have been provided with some direct Charter funding from the Government to help us reshape our schedules and reformulate our mission. At this stage, the direct funding stands at about 5% of our commercial revenue.
As we become more recognisably a public broadcaster, the balance of our income may change. The Government’s direct funding, though modest right now, acknowledges that there will be a cost to implementing the Charter and it has been prepared to break with the principle of arms-length, contestable funding through New Zealand on Air in order to support TVNZ directly to deliver the Charter. Alongside the review of public broadcasting that started late last year and will span most of 2004, there is a review of the funding structure going on. That may produce a different balance of income from the public purse against what we earn for ourselves in the market.
What it won’t do is fully fund us. While it is clear the Government recognises that its reason for owning TVNZ is to pursue public broadcasting objectives, we will be obliged to pursue them as a mixed economy. We must continue to place a strong focus on financial solvency, which means we can’t afford to become an unattractive, unwelcoming place for advertisers. We are not mandated as a “pure” model of public service broadcaster and the reason is relatively straightforward. Our Government, as the Government of Ireland did again recently, takes the view that New Zealand can’t afford the luxury of two – or indeed one non-commercial TVNZ channels. That’s a political priority. Hip transplants, cancer operations, schooling all have a higher priority within a finite budget than establishing a commercial-free TVNZ. Whatever the balance of public to commercial funding in future, we will remain subject to a dual remit: deliver the Charter, don’t screw the business.
No-one said that would be easy but I’m confident we can do it – even more confident now that we’ve been living with the Charter for almost a year. We have far more focus now on what delivering the Charter will mean. So, let me, finally, describe what I see as the defining characteristic of TVNZ, as we set about delivering the public service broadcasting values laid out in the Charter, keeping a sharp eye on our commercial performance.
It’s about identity. In an age of globalisation, when “Out There” threatens to engulf us in great tidal surges, there is a special place, and a special opportunity, for the public broadcaster. Add to that the fact that TVNZ is the only television broadcaster owned by New Zealanders and the logic of the strategy becomes even more compelling.
There is a paradox in globalism. The more intense, the more insistent the global signals and pressures become, the more intense becomes our need to feel that we are part of a unique community in a unique place. It is our mission to make sure that TVNZ, fulfilling its Charter, is even more emphatically the place all New Zealanders turn to for their defining moments and their shared experiences. It’s right that the public broadcaster, owned by the people, should be the place they instinctively look to for their information, their entertainment and to unite in a shared sense of what it means to be a New Zealander.
Our willingness, our commitment to invest substantially more in New Zealand made programmes – programmes that reflect our culture and our society – this is what will increasingly set us apart from our commercial competitors.
Although we haven’t yet made the details public, TVNZ, board and management, decided recently to make a stepchange in the quantity and quality of the local content we broadcast. It is a radical initiative. If you consider that currently across two channels we broadcast an average of 35 percent New Zealand made content, we are talking of lifting that, perhaps, to an average 50 percent within three or four years. Each percentage point represents 100 hours of local production. We will make this commitment, in the first place, by putting significantly more of our commercial revenues into local content and by rebalancing what we invest in local as against imported programming.
Commitment. In the end, as we navigate the tricky course set for us, it will all come down to commitment. Bob Collins, the outgoing head of RTE, made an inspiring contribution to our debate at a broadcasting conference in Wellington in November. He said: “One of the very basic tests or challenges for a public broadcaster is to want to be one. If the public charge is a burden; if one is being led, as it were, reluctantly to school; if the public responsibility is in some way perceived as a restraint on more “normal” commercial behaviour, then perhaps it’s time to consider a different profession. Maybe one is being called to a different life. To be successful, the public purpose must be that around which the very concept, the structure, the funding, the obligations and the perspective on the world are built.” At TVNZ we want categorically to be a public broadcaster. We know the destination and we have set our course. We expect the journey to be challenging. When is it not in broadcasting? We sense already that we are living more fully: hearts are beating faster, palms are sweaty. And when we get there –and we will – maybe we can redirect the jibe occasionally flung at television. You’ve probably heard it. Some of you may have told it. It goes: why is television called a medium? The answer: because it’s neither rare nor well done. We’ll be defining ourselves as a medium because, like that other, psychic definition of “medium”, we’re seen to be in direct connection with the spirits of our place.
And all that by Tuesday week!